Why the Climate Talks in Copenhagen Were a Farce

Perpetual motion machines. Anti-gravity devices. Carbon capture and sequestration technology. Here’s the question— “What do these three scientific ideas all have in common?”

Answer— they violate all the known laws of physics, chemistry, and thermodynamics, and this inconvenient reality means that all three ideas are bogus in a way that makes them completely mythological. But don’t tell that to the Exxon Mobil public relations people. Exxon Mobil claims in television ads that the oil and gas corporate giant is spending 100 million dollars on a facility to remove carbon from natural gas and return the CO2 to the earth from which it came. 100 million dollars. WOW, what a commitment. That equals the profits made by Exxon Mobil every hour and fifteen minutes. Not only that, but this same carbon capture and sequestration technology is being touted by the coal industry as the wave of the future in their quest for green, clean coal.

All of this public relations smoke-and-mirrors campaign works extraordinarily well on the American citizens because they’ve been dumbed-down by 40 years of education in a school system that ranks #27 in the world at teaching science. Why is this important? Because these same scientific illiterates are able to vote and breed, and it’s their children who will suffer.

Consider these facts. Carbon capture and sequestration technology would take something like the WWII Manhattan Project kind of scientific effort to make it work, if it could ever work at all. The Manhattan Project which built the atomic bomb spent 2 billion dollars back in 1944 and 1945 when a billion dollars was serious money. That would equal about 55 billion dollars today. Exxon Mobil knows full well that 100 million dollars spent on public relations is much cheaper that billions spent on actual science, and the people who are targeted by their television ads don’t know the difference, so Exxon Mobil is, in reality, doing exactly what it should do to remain profitable. And, God knows, remaining profitable is really the only game that is being played here.

If the oil and gas industry’s shell game can be called self-serving and disingenuous, then the “clean coal” strategy followed by the global coal industry needs to be labeled as borderline criminal. China alone brings a new coal-fired generation plant on line every five days, and none of these are designed to be retrofitted with carbon capture technology at any point in the future. Even if this technology could become feasible, it could never actually be applied because of the gigantic number of applications involved. And if that situation seems daunting, then consider this— to replace all of the world’s existing coal-based electricity with nuclear power would require the building of a new nuclear generation plant every day for the next 36 years.

So this, in a nutshell, explains why the climate talks in Copenhagen are such a farce. It’s rather like the Curia of the Roman Catholic Church meeting to address priestly sexual abuse. The only thing that you can do as a private American citizen is to avoid buying any beach front property with the intent of passing it on to your grandchildren.

Editorial note about “The Stonecypher”

In this age of ubiquitous Facebook and Twitter, I had come to wonder if another simple blog like The Stonecypher had any real value. Hence, no postings by me for almost four months. But now, as I start to prepare for this year’s annual Conference on World Affairs, I’m back with what I hope will be relevant observations.

America— More of an Economy than a Society

There’s an old adage that says, “When two men fight over a woman, they want the fight more than the woman.” And the thing that I remember personally from college is that food fights were never about food. Never! Which brings me to the town hall meetings and the so-called “Tea Parties,” all of which have absolutely nothing to do with healthcare legislation or big government. America just wants a fight. It’s that simple.

My wife and I have spent quality time in two-thirds of the nations on earth over the last twenty or so years. As we've learned for ourselves, without exception, all of the OTHER countries of the world see themselves as (first and foremost) a society. Even the places like China and Burma and Iran get the picture— that the glue of societal common bonding can help citizens cope with even the most oppressive and harsh of national governments. By contrast, we in the U.S.A. see our country as an economy (primarily) and a military superpower (secondarily) and societal considerations are relegated to tertiary status at best. Once I came to realize this, I also realized that obsessing about things like healthcare or big government was as futile as obsessing about impending death just because I'm getting older. So America will now have to make its way without my guidance and input.

The nations that have universal healthcare (this is everyone but the U.S.A.) all started with the premise that ALL citizens would get healthcare. This was the only piece of the puzzle that was non-negotiable. For the most part, none of those other nations got it right when they started. Certainly, none of them achieved perfection on their first try. They each tinkered with their plans and changed the functions and features until they made it workable, with the result that the many different nations have many different systems today for managing and funding their health care. But they all did what they had to do to reach the fundamental goal of universal coverage. We, by contrast, start with a budget (we're an economy, don't forget) and then we ask ourselves what we can afford.

In my lifetime, I've watched America enthusiastically plunge into three wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq) and nobody, liberal or conservative, ever said we should slow down until we knew all the details. And god knows, nobody ever questioned the cost. We're a military superpower, don't forget, or at least we see ourselves that way. Of course, this makes it hard to explain why we can start wars so easily, but why we can never seem to win those wars, but that’s a topic for another blog.

So let's not kid ourselves about the healthcare issue, or about the rage that fuels the town hall meetings and the Tea Parties. Obama's healthcare plan is full of shortcomings and vagaries and imperfections, but this wouldn't matter if we saw ourselves as, primarily, a society above all else. But we don’t. America wants this internal fight simply for the sake of internal fighting, just like the food fights in college. This is why I’ve repeatedly predicted that there will be another civil war, although probably not in my lifetime. This isn't a matter of swinging pendulums. Those irate idiots (on both sides) at the town hall meetings will not be satisfied with a swing of the pendulum. Someone on each side of the abortion issue has now been murdered in cold blood simply because someone on the other side of the issue wanted to end the debate, so on the microcosmic level, the civil war has already begun. I’m going to just stay the hell out of it, because The United States of America isn't worth it anymore.

Jesus— The Pathetic Communicator

Whenever I venture out into foreign nations, particularly those third-world countries with non-Christian religions, I am always struck by one supremely evident reality. When describing the Christian God, He or She or It, or whatever the hell the father figure is supposed to be, is without doubt a perfectly terrible communicator. If we accept the basic belief of Christianity— that one can attain everlasting life in Heaven only by accepting Jesus Christ as a Savior, then that belief (if true) would be the most important single fact in the life of every human being on the planet. One would think that a loving and fair God would make sure that every human had access to the complete information about the importance of this fact so that every person would be on a level playing field when it came time to save their soul. Alas, such is not the case.

The majority of earth’s people have never heard of the Bible’s teachings, and they think of the Scripture itself (if they think of it at all) as just another famous book— like Moby Dick. Christian fundamentalists still think that their missionaries are getting the word out, but the truth is that most Christian missionaries went out of business when the British Empire went out of business back in the late 1940s. At that time, the global population was less than 2 billion. Since then, the population has increased to nearly 7 billion with almost all of the 5 billion new humans being born into Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu cultures. These are the people who could care less what the Gospels have to say, if they bother to care at all, because they’ve been ignored and condemned to hell by lousy communication from a small-time Savior who doesn’t know how to conduct salvation on a scale as large as five billion people.

You’d think that if God is so almighty that he could create the heavens and the earth, he might be able to accomplish what the most basic public relations professional does every day. He might be able to communicate effectively with a wide audience on a topic of great individual importance. Instead, this supposedly almighty God communicates his all-important game plan with a single parochial publication and a relatively small staff of self-anointed prophets and imperfect teachers, thus insuring that most of his flock will remain ignorant about their own eternal fate until the day they die and it’s too late. My personal belief is that Christian evangelical fundamentalists absolutely like it this way. This little system makes them feel special in their belief that they will be saved, while almost everyone else goes to hell. It’s really all about feeling special.

When Civil War Breaks Out, the Conservatives Will Triumph

Readers who had been following “The Stonecypher” are aware that nothing new has been published for several months now. My wife and I have been cavorting through the jungles of some third-world Asian rainforest slums, but we are home now and I am back to my blog.

Our travels brought us into the company of a British couple, a retired university economics professor and his wife, a retired French teacher. After a week or so, when we had all established our mutual intellectual credentials to the extent that our opinions were valued within the group, he asked me what I predicted In America’s future. I replied that I could see a full-fledged civil war in the U.S.A. within fifty years, and probably much sooner than that. He asked if I meant a war with white against black, and I assured him, “Absolutely not. The racial differences have been, more or less, settled and Barack Obama’s presidency is the proof of that. The civil war,” I explained, “Will be between the liberals and the conservatives.” He asked, “Who will win?” I told him without hesitation, “The conservatives will win. They have all the guns.”

Our once-united nation is, I believe, irreversibly bifurcated and polarized. The conservatives now know that democratic, freely-held elections are not a reliable way to gain power and advance their cause, and it’s only a matter of time until they bring out their considerable firepower to have their own way. If a conservative pro-lifer can kill an abortion doctor, it’s a small step from one murder to multiple murders. If a liberal shoots back, the fight will be on.

While we were away from America, a new term entered our nation lexicon, the “birther” movement. “Birthers” are the conservatives who fervently believe that Obama was born in Kenya, and a good many of them also believe that his mother was a goat and his father was Lucifer, making Barack the Antichrist. These “birthers” have strong convictions about their ability to see through the spin and propaganda coming from the Left. They see themselves as truth-finders, able to find the hidden facts behind conspiracies and uncover answers to questions like, “Where does the sun REALLY go at night?”

In revolutions and civil wars, the first to die are always the “intelligentsia”— rounded up and eliminated before their ideas can contaminate the masses. One doesn’t need to be a student of history to see that the conservatives, armed to the teeth and free from the constraints of intellect, will eventually get whatever they want without the need to go through the ballot box process.

Killing for Conservatism (and Probably for Jesus, Too)

Conservative Republicans, knowing that they lack sufficient clout in the Senate to block the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, are now talking about filibustering the process to —quote, “Demonstrate their differences.” The last thing that the world needs is another demonstration of Conservative “differences,” especially after the brazen murder last weekend of Doctor George Tiller. Tiller was the abortion doctor who was assassinated in church during Sunday morning worship because some Conservative pro-lifer thought that his murder would save the lives of late term fetuses. One caller to a Conservative radio talk show defended the murder by calling it “the very late term abortion of Doctor Tiller.” I guess he thought he was being clever.

Last Friday, on his afternoon three-hour rant, Rush Limbaugh spent most of his radio show whining that Liberals were “mean” and Conservatives were “nice.” I don’t know how Limbaugh defines the word, “mean,” but I think committing murder might qualify as one definition. Conservatives don’t need to oppose the Sotomayor nomination to demonstrate their differences. Conservatives are willing to kill for their beliefs. Liberals don’t do that. That’s the difference.

Eulogy for General Motors

I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE proclaimed the small stickpin tin lapel buttons that were given out to patrons when they exited the General Motors Futurama pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. Billing itself with the slogan, "The World of Tomorrow," the fair became a two-year celebration dedicated to the blessings of democracy and the wonders of technology, and it was this latter purpose, the apotheosis of technology, that captured the imagination of the fairgoers in a way unlikely to ever be seen again. During those two incredible years, sandwiched between a decade of economic hopelessness and the coming horror of the Second World War, it seemed for a brief moment that anything was possible.

The Futurama of General Motors which had been designed by futurist, Norman Bel Geddes, was meant to show the American landscape as it was predicted to look in the year 1960. Bel Geddes' vision of the future included 1,500-foot-high office buildings, taller than the Empire State Building constructed with lavish use of aluminum and glass, 14-lane superhighways that would allow a driver to travel coast-to-coast without stopping for anything but food and gasoline, and small individual vehicles capable of traveling by both roadway and air. Other components of future technology, envisioned in Futurama, told the people of that time what they could expect to see in the next 25 years. These anticipated marvels, prophesied in 1939, were realistically expected to exist in the early 1960s: the cautious but feasible use of atomic energy for power production, ubiquitous plastics, television sets in every home supported by a broadcast infrastructure, nylon stockings for women, rockets capable of orbiting above earth's atmosphere, radio telephones for occasional use in automobiles, aircraft capable of carrying 200 passengers at 400 mph, antibiotics, warships an eighth of a mile long, prefabricated low-cost houses, and fresh fruits and vegetables available at any time of year.

All of this predicted wonderment was set against the backdrop of an America that had the world’s greatest production capacity, on a planet that held only 2 billion human beings, all living in an atmospheric environment that had changed very little over the previous half million years. In that time of 1939, General Motors was the largest and richest corporation on the face of the earth.

Things can change dramatically in 70 years, in ways that could never have been envisioned back in 1939. The futuristic gizmos and products and developments came into being just as predicted, but along with them came environmental pollution and global population explosion and materialistic cultural changes that, arguably, made the world no better than it was back then. Today, when we talk about “The World of Tomorrow,” we don’t celebrate this vision with optimism and eager anticipation. In a way, the fate of General Motors serves as a kind of metaphor for everything else.